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I configured plex server in my Arch Linux. While setting the media folder the folder which contains a symbolic link content is not listing in media server.

I added the current user to the plex group.

Please let us know anyone getting the same issue

Vipin
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2 Answers2

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I have the same problem. I do not like hardlinks, and PLEX does not seem to play nice with symlinks. Fortunately, thanks to this reddit comment, I found that symlinking relatively to the current directory works for PLEX. This means that the symlink must not be absolute, but relative to the folder PLEX scans.

A link which points to /mnt/RAID1/PLEX/Movies/something must become ../Movies/something.

AF7
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    You do a mount with --bind option that was the only solution Working for me. – Vipin Jan 11 '19 at 16:27
  • Symlinks did work for me in the end, and I find them to be more flexible. Maybe it depends on the setup, Plex really loves if all of the media resides in the Media folder and is not happy if this does not happen. – AF7 Jan 12 '19 at 17:07
  • How did you made the symbolic link work? – Vipin Jan 12 '19 at 17:09
  • @Vipin, as I said, I just had to make sure the link was relative. Afterwards, I verified that also having an absolute link worked, but only if the target was inside Media, for some reason. Plex is weird. – AF7 Jan 13 '19 at 18:10
  • After changing the link to symbolic links, it worked for me. The command I run: find ../gmc/* -type f -exec ln -s {} . ';' – Q. Qiao Mar 04 '20 at 12:15
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Edited answer

I was wrong. After fiddling with symlinks, I realized my mistake. Target folders/files need reading permissions. You have to chmod -R +r SOURCE_FOLDER. Now the symbolic links work as intended.

Original answer

As far as I can tell, Plex doesn't recognize symbolic links. I've tried symlinks to both, files and folders, to no avail. This discussion from 2013–2015 in a plex forum suggest to symlink directories, but it didn't work for me.

Ludenticus
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  • Thanks . My problem is, I have a external drive which need to be added to plex media Server. So without using symbolic link how can I do this? Otherwise. I need to copy all the videos present in extenal drive to my system while running plex. – Vipin May 22 '18 at 15:39
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    You can do a `mount --bind`. This can also be added to fstab. – Mikael Kjær May 23 '18 at 05:09
  • @MikaelKjær Can you please give me little more information – Vipin May 26 '18 at 06:53
  • @Vipin Basically it mounts a folder into another folder. Here is a guide for it: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-mount-bind-partitions-filesystems-in-linux/ – Mikael Kjær May 27 '18 at 05:09
  • @ Mikael Kjær @Ludenticus chmod -R +r SOURCE_FOLDER is not working. mount --bind seems to be working. But i'm getting another issue my external disk is /dev/sdb1 it is mounting properly at /run/media/vipin/USBDataDisk. And I'm try to mount --bind /run/media/vipin/USBDataDisk/Mydata/Film/ /plexmedia/movies . It is working fine. But my /run/media/vipin/USBDataDisk mounting point is replaced with /plexmedia/movies – Vipin May 29 '18 at 20:44